Skype, which has made a deal to sell out to Microsoft, has had a turbulent few months with repeated outages that led to Vidyo lambasting it as "unreliable for business", however that hasn't stopped the firm from ploughing ahead to market more premium features. Skype 5.2 for the Mac lets users share their screens among video call participants, allowing them to view presentations, pictures and other files.

Skype is also promoting its multi-tasking capabilities, or more accurately being able to see the group of people you are having a conference with while launching new applications. Apparently it is a feature that many Skype users have been asking for.

Although these features are impressive and useful, especially for businesses, Skype's introduction of multi-participant video calls and desktop sharing is only available to those who have a Skype Premium subscription, which costs around £5 a month.

And while Skype was busy touting Skype 5.2 for Mac, Microsoft Windows users will note that the firm has already moved onto version 5.3, and there is an open Skype 5.5 beta with Facebook integration available for download.

As Microsoft gets its claws into Skype it is likely that the Windows and possibly the Windows Phone 7 clients will have even more of a feature head start over clients on Mac OS X and Linux. µ